


tabula rasa

by empyrean



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 05:12:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1089997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/empyrean/pseuds/empyrean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Also known as, 'The Winter Watson Shared her Room With Bees', or 'The Many Attempts to Begin the Casebook of Sherlock Holmes'.</p><p>Somehow, after the bees and the bombs, Joan muddles her way to an understanding of the ridiculous life she has ended up with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tabula rasa

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UrbanAmazon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/gifts).



tabula rasa

New York in January always catches her by surprise. Never mind that she grew up here, that she lives here, that the winters should have failed to be a shock long ago. The city starts to wake up, but she decides to keep hibernating.

The crisp, pristine blankness of a white page. Visual winter. It tells of new beginnings, places to be seen, adventures to be told.

Except the blinking cursor is mocking her, she knows it.

Joan Watson throws her hands up in the air and flops back on the bed, letting her laptop (with the word processor sat open and blank _blank_ **_blank_** ) rest in judgement on her lap.

Well, there was a title at least.

_Sherlock Holmes_

How did that even begin to do anything, _everything_ justice?

She sighs, shuts the computer and pads downstairs, toes curling on the cold boards. Steps over the open casefiles. Past the trash bags with the _something_ in them.  Around a suspicious box labelled with post-its declaring ‘probably not explosive’.

Oh good.

Her running shoes were buried underneath what looked like Sherlock’s latest attempt at creating the perfect burglar’s toolkit (evidence: lockpicks, wires, and for some reason a tourist’s guide to Belarus).

‘Sherlock, I’m going jogging.’

There was a banging from somewhere in the building, then silence.

In hindsight, she really should have realised how ominous that was.

*

When she returns feeling refreshed and relaxed Joan makes it as far as the doorway of her room. Stops. Looks. Turns around and heads straight back downstairs.

Sherlock doesn’t so much as flinch when Joan opens _(slams)_ the door.

‘Ah Watson, you have discovered your new room mates.’

‘Sherlock there are bees in my room, a skull in the bathroom and _ohmygod_ _what is that smell_?’

‘Essence of Amorphophallus titanium, or titan arum. Commonly known as-’

‘Corpse Flower, I know. _Why_.’

‘I am attempting to teach Clyde to recognise the smell of a decomposing body. This was the closest alternative to actually locating a dead body and bringing it here and I suspected that would upset you.’

This is, Joan admits to herself, progress. She looks at Clyde, who wiggles his legs from his position in Sherlock’s hands and looks as put-upon as a tortoise could.

‘Couldn’t you just take him to the morgue? I’m sure the ME would be grateful – it’d be the least strange thing you’ve done to one of his corpses. And anyway, don’t they usually use dogs for that sort of thing?’

‘Tortoises have a keen sense of smell, are cleaner and make less noise.’

‘And don’t bite you when you force them to smell decomp?’

He hums agreement. Clyde continued to look mournful, and Joan almost forgets she was annoyed about something. Sherlock is the master of misdirection, but it can be hard to tell whether he’s doing it on purpose or if he has simply forgotten that she was about to be angry at him about something.

‘There is a bee hive in my room.’

‘An astute and accurate observation, Watson. Congratulations.’

She glazes over the sarcasm. That can be hard to tell whether it’s on purpose or not too.

‘ _Why_ is there a bee hive in my room?’

‘I thought you would enjoy the company of your namesake, and as the other rooms in the house are filled with my-’

‘Clutter.’

‘ _Artefacts_. The hive also requires a constant, regular temperature well above the norm for New York in winter so a personal space heater will need to be placed in your room as well.’

It isn’t pure altruism, the bees were probably always going in her room anyway, but all Joan hears is ‘Your room is cold and I am an awkward dork who needs an excuse to be kind.’

She knows enough to know he won’t thank her for this observation. Instead:

‘Why are you doing this,’ she gestures to the tortoise and the corpse-smell test and the madman in the socks ‘instead of crime-things?’

‘Apparently the entire criminal population of New York has decided to hibernate for the winter.’

‘Smart criminals.’

*

The bees, it turns out, are actually good company.

They’re (relatively) quiet, don’t take up much room and aren’t into the habit of bursting into her room at 5am, pulling clothes out of her closet and throwing them on the bed whilst declaring that there’s been a murder with an unnecessary amount of enthusiasm.

It’s actually kind of incredible. He has a remarkable knack for picking out complete outfits that she likes, so she really has no idea how he always looks like he ran through a thrift shop and picked stuff out blindfolded.

She’s met the immaculate Mycroft. Suits and scars his brother is too perceptive to ever actually _see_.

She keeps that particular observation to herself.

But it never fails to entertain – watching people watch Sherlock. Those cops who only know him as Gregson’s golden boy (rather than Gregson’s brilliant but complete pain in the ass), who see the socks and the jumpers and the accent and make the same mistake as the criminals.

It helps that she’s pretty certain Gregson and Bell think it’s funny too.

‘Watson!’

Sherlock’s sense of dramatic timing is immaculate, at least. He bursts into her room, dumps a paper cup into her hands and starts rifling through her clothes. She squints at her phone and hopes she’s reading the numbers wrong.

‘It’s 6 a.m.’

‘And there are two bodies awaiting us already. The day is going to be _wonderful_.’

‘It’s 6 a.m and you brought me coffee.’ She eyes it suspiciously. The cup _looks_ innocent enough. Starbucks, even. ‘This isn’t another test, is it?’

‘No, undetectable poisons is next week.’

Of course it is.

She takes a cautious sip and is surprised by the presence of cream and sugar – she usually ends up taking her coffee the way he does, and Sherlock does not believe in watering down the strongest stimulant he’s allowed to have.

‘Come along, Watson. It’s at a stockbroker’s and I wish to evade the inevitable cavalcade of lawyers.’

‘Right, right.’

She balances the cup on the cabinet and pulls on the clothes Sherlock threw over while he makes noises about _huge corporations_ and _strangleholds_ and _embodiment of evil_ whilst looking at the green mermaid like it had done something personally to offend him. Maybe it had – the nearest three chains had notices up saying not to serve him after the last time.

‘Easy, boy. You’re starting to sound like Everyone.’

He snorts.

‘When I fall into company with a group of surprisingly vindictive hackers, Watson, I shall let you know.’

‘You _do_ tend to attract criminals.’

She regrets it as soon as she says it, but by the time her head emerges from the sweater any expression he might have been making is gone.

‘What?’

He blinks, shakes himself, beams.

‘Corpses, Watson, corpses!’

And bounds out of the room. Joan picks up her coffee, rolls out of bed and finishes dressing to the sound of bees.

*

‘Writer’s block, Watson?’

She stares at him over the top of her laptop. Draped over the couch with his head hanging over the arm, he hasn’t moved, spoken or even acknowledged that she was there for three hours. She knew he’d been asleep because apparently when not actually passed out from exhaustion Sherlock was a restless sleeper. He twitched, kicked, and about an hour ago had barked ‘Fatty!’ so loudly she had turned to make sure Mycroft had not actually invaded the house again.

‘You can’t possibly tell that.’

‘You have typed 6 sentences the average length of 14.3 words typical in the English language. You have been backspacing and rewriting constantly for the last fifteen minutes.’

‘How-’ She looks down at her hands, and smiles. ‘My backspace key sticks.’

Upside down, the smirk that he strenuously denies signals approval is actually oddly endearing.

‘How about _The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk_?’

‘Boring. Trite. _Pedestrian_.’ She can hear the sneer. ‘I didn’t realise you were fond of the kind of writing usually found in Victorian crime periodicals.’

 _Sherlock really is sweet,_ she told Oren once. _He never lets me just **like** him for even a minute. _

She looks at the screen

_The Adven_

And slowly keeps backspacing.

*

She gets her moments, sometimes. The spaces to breathe between cases, or between one of Sherlock and Mycroft's epic transatlantic arguments that somehow she had become part of.

Her writing, for once, is going perfectly. She’s managed to find a way to turn her own casefiles into a narrative – holding back information, staging the reveals, organising the pattern of events into something more than just data.

Of course, this is the moment that the house explodes.

She has her back to the window, winter sun streaming in clear and pale. The only warning she gets is the glass shattering behind her, and then something rolls onto the floor and comes to a stop in front of the doorway to the entrance hall.

It should probably be worrying that the only clear thought in her mind is _not again_.

There’s a deep, thrumming drone and Joan wonders if it’s a delayed action explosive before she remembers that the bees don’t understand that things flying through windows are generally a bad thing.  Then Sherlock is bundling her behind the couch, pressing her down with elbows and knees everywhere and _God_ that man is all angles.

‘You know-’ Breathe in around one of the pointy elbows digging into her stomach ‘If it’s a bomb and it goes off, the furnishings won’t save us.’

‘I bought it off a rather paranoid member of the royal family. It’s been reinforced to withstand explosions at close range.’

‘Oh.’ _Of **course** it has._ ‘Which royal family?’

‘None of any importance.’ He’s peering over the top of the cushions, and when she pulls him back down his sweater leaves a yellow powder on her fingers.

‘Pollen?’

‘Yes.’ He smiles suddenly, sharply. ‘Care to deduct the origin?’

‘A flower.’

He raises his eyebrows.

‘Sorry.’ She flicks the pollen off her hands, fragrant dust floating down to the floor. “Ridiculous questions no one can know the answer to’ is next week.’

‘Wolf’s bane, Watson. Aconite.’

‘A paralytic.’

‘Recent papers have confirmed it to have analgesic properties in some forms.’

‘But it’s unpredictable and unrefined and it’s probably better to use one that we know works rather than some weird poison that leaves barely any trace.’

‘It leaves evidence.’ He actually sounds offended at the possibility of anything being undetectable.

‘Only asphyxia is noticeable post-mortem, and any doctor can tell you just about anything can cause that.’

The smile again. Approval. It’s actually kind of unnerving.

He starts to sit back up and she grabs at him, never mind the pollen.

‘The bomb-’

‘If it was going to go off, it would have done by now. An optimal fuse would not allow enough time for the intended victims to escape the blast radius.’

‘Comforting, thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’ He prowls around it, and up close it really does look like an innocuous box of wires, a kid’s electronics project. She says as much to Sherlock between texts to Bell and Gregson. It turns out ‘probably not going to explode’ isn’t any more of a comfort to them then it is to her.

‘It does have an amateurish flair.’ He actually manages to look _offended_. ‘Explosives can be fickle things.’

‘So I hear.’ She imagines the email she’ll be sending to her mother later.

_Mom – today a bomb was thrown in through the window, so I lay on the floor with Sherlock and we discussed poisons whilst hiding behind a couch he got from royalty. How was the mah-jong tournament last night?_

She can hear clattering downstairs – Bell has a key to the brownstone that Sherlock claims to know nothing about. As if he has heard his name being called, Sherlock grins up at her, all teeth. ‘This is excellent, Watson. A bomb through the window, and it’s not even Christmas.’

Joan and the just-arrived Bell take the opportunity to share a moment of silent commiseration. The drone of bees thrums through the room and out of the now broken window she can hear the sounds of the city.

Strangely, it feels a little like home.

*

Except -

Except sometimes, just sometimes, she feels like the universe is conspiring to punish her for something she did in a previous life.

Sherlock’s unsolved casefiles mostly stay that way, apart from one. A confidence trickster, counterfeiter, ‘a man with a thousand names and none of them his’ as Sherlock puts it to her when she’s flicking through the file. He’s tending to the bees still shut up in her room, checking the airflow and the temperature of the hive and generally fussing over them like a mother with a new baby whilst giving her a stinging list of failures committed by the investigating officers of the Winter/Morecroft/Evans cases.

‘The methods are all different. You think a guy wanted for murder is now conning people out of their money?’

‘All crimes are committed because someone wants something. Evans always wanted capital; he has merely discovered a more intelligent way to get it.’

‘And you think he’s now acting as an antiques dealer to get access to people’s garages? Surely people know better than to let a strange man in amongst their abandoned gardening tools and rusting DIY stuff?’

‘People have an outstanding capacity for stupidity.’

There's nothing in that for her, so she lets it slide. If she gives him any encouragement he will go on a detailed description of all the people he's smarter than. In alphabetical order.

‘How do you know about all this?’

‘I may have gained access to Evans’ email address.’

‘ _Hmm_?’ It doesn’t sound as disapproving as she wants it to.

 ‘Evans has sent Garrideb several emails referring to something in his possession that is of great interest to him.’

‘An antique?’

‘Some 13th Century item or other. That is not the true subject of Evans’ intent.’

‘He _is_ pretty insistent on going to the house, rather than Garrideb going to his store.’

‘Therefore?’

‘There’s something in there he wants but can’t tell anyone about.’

‘Exactly.’

There’s a long moment of silence, and she just knows he’s waiting for her to ask -

‘So what does he want from Garrideb’s garage?’

‘I have no idea. Let’s go ask him.’

This is, it turns out, a terrible idea.

Evans is polite, affable, bemused by their presence and the pointed nature of Sherlock’s questions about Garrideb’s collection. Watson admires the collections of antique coins and furniture when some thrum of tension in Sherlock’s voice tells her to _turn around_.

She’s looking at Sherlock, so she knows something is going wrong before it even happens. His shoulders stiffen, his head snaps towards her and suddenly she’s falling backwards and the entire world is sliding away under her feet.

When she looks down and sees the neat red line slicing across her thigh, she has the presence of mind to feel slightly embarrassed. She drops into a Queen Anne chair and studies the bullet wound with a surgeon’s eye and the knowledge that the pain, when it comes, will still be a surprise.

Then she looks up.

Sherlock _rounds_ on Garrideb, and just for a moment she can see the man who wanted to kill Moran – the one who Irene or Moriarty or whatever her true name is wants him to be.

‘Sherlock.’

She can see tendons moving in his neck.

‘Sherlock, come here and help me.’

The moment passes and once again Sherlock is just a man in a hideous sweater and ridiculous socks, crouching down in front of her and pressing a cloth to her leg with the same cut-from-stone still expression he reserves for when he is trying to keep something to himself.

‘Alright?’

There’s a tremor. A certain crack in his voice. She has seen him speak gently to victims and snark at gunmen and knows with a terrible certainty that if she had died here the NYPD would finally be investigating a murder committed by Sherlock Holmes. Garrideb would not have left this room alive. She watches a muscle in his cheek twitch.

 _I know you_ , she thinks, _I know things about you even you don’t know_.

‘Sherlock.’

He doesn’t look up, and she can feel his fingers twitch against her thigh.

‘Sherlock. It’s fine.’

The repetition is becoming a habit. Maybe she needs reassurance that she did, in fact, just say what she just said.

**_Please_ ** _take the brain out of the sink._

_Why are you reorganising **the entire house** at 3 in the morning?_

_Clean the microwave, you left **something** in there and I think it’s gaining sentience._

This cannot be her life, she thinks sometimes. Maybe the person it originally belonged to died and she got handed the leftovers.

‘It’s fine, really. It’s all fine.’

She thinks of the bees.

This cannot be her life. But for a while at least, she thinks she’s going to keep it.

**Author's Note:**

> I apologise for any mistakes made in my botany/biology/American - those will be due to the author not being a botanist/biologist/American, any British-isms that snuck in are entirely mine.
> 
> There are a few references to the canon Holmes stories, so I thank my gift requester for getting me to read them again!


End file.
